7 British Soldiers wounded in Battle with Badr, Demonstrators in Amarah

Edited on Sun Mar-07-04 10:06 AM by Aidoneus

'Badr' being the Badr Corps, armed wing of the up-to-now collaborationist SAIRI/SCIRI party..

7 British Soldiers wounded in Battle with Badr, Demonstrators in Amarah

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The police chief in the province of Maysan announced yesterday that two Iraqi civilians, one of them a woman, were killed Friday in confrontations and an exchange of fire between demonstrators and elements belonging to the Badr Corps on the one hand, and between British troops on the other, in the province of Amarah in southern Iraq. A Coalition spokesman confirmed the confrontations, which led to the wounding of 7 British soldiers, but said he had no information on civilian casualties.

Capt. Isma`il Kadhim said that "Someone opened fire on a British patrol, before it took cover in a site belonging to the Badr Corps." This is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in the town of Qala Salih (40 km south of Amarah). He continued, "The British entered the building and took everyone inside prisoner, confiscating weapons. But a crowd was around the building, which confronted them and damaged military equipment."

--snip--

Kadhim said that the troops asked for reinforcements, so a military helicopter was sent to support them. Likewise, the road between Amarah and Basra was cut, and guns were fired, killing two, a man and a woman.

this seems more incidental than them "turning on us" ("us" not including me), but a series of the former would undoubtably lead closer to the latter.

What's more likely than the collaborationist parties "turning on us" would be their ranks deserting them, joining movements and organizations who had retained a principled stance WRT the invasion and occupation. The "turning on us" scenario in this case has more likelihood when they realize that the promises they bought into were a pack of lies and, far from assuming real power when the occupation is "ended"--by their own admission, this is the only reason they now choke down their pride and act as stepanfetchits--, they will only be expected to act as craven puppets and a thin Arab face to a long occupation.

Sistani & Sadr are, of course, the biggest beneficiaries of the capitulation of collaborationist parties like SCIRI & al-Daawa. The latter most ironically, it having been the first--and yes, I know Hizbullah or the Tamil Black Tigers are usually, wrongly, credited with such--to pioneer the use of human-bombs/"suicide bombs", having deployed them against US embassies in the region and US puppet leaders, including the Baathists. There are others that do not make the news, particularly the Revenge of God detachments preparing and entrenching in al-Basrah, along with other movements all over the south, in order to strike at the occupation at a later date.

The British occupation forces' method of dealing with these movements is to their short term benefit and long term detriment--they just sit back and let them operate, allowing them to openly spread both the daawa and build the infrastructure of supplies for future conflicts. The Islamic resistance in al-Fallujah took on a particularly militant character when the US occupation forces employed appallingly fascist methods of rule, maintaining its popularity with the people for the very same reasons--the harder US forces hit the Iraqi people, the stronger these groups become. Other tendencies of the resistance, particularly the Left-wing of the Baathists, Nasserists, and dissident communists, three tendencies ruthlessly persecuted under Saddam, would have naturally taken up the fight by the time they did anyway through their inherent anti-imperialist and Arab Nationalist ideologies. Of course, the "remants of Saddam's regime", comprising a miniscule portion of the resistance as a whole, needed no provocations such as there was in al-Fallujah. In the south it is not so that the people and militants are less militant, but are using the time to prepare for the future while the fighting in the north keeps the occupation forces tied down. There is also a prevailing "wait and see" attitude that they take from their marjaiyya/"Object of Emulation", Sayyid Sistani.

The movement was founded in Qassam's time, where communists and atheists ran wild (good times, from what I read.. shame it turned out as it did). The Shia establishment wanted to prove that they were not irrelevant, and under then-marjaiyya Muhsin al-Hakim's (grandfather of Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, SCIRI's martyred leader) blessings, al-Daawa was formed in Najaf under mostly the leadership of a man named Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr. Sayyid al-Sadr was a peer of Khomeini, his superior for years until the latter ran into a bit of luck in deposing the guy watching over America's oil next door.

From early on it was a social & political movement, under General Bakr and moreso under Saddam becoming increasingly militant. The big shift in the party came in the late 70s/80s, insprired in part by the increasingly authoritarian state in Baghdad and the example of the successful revolution next door. Attacks on Baathist government officials were stepped up, and the reprisals were harsh:--among other restrictions such as party membership being made a death sentence, Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr was detained and executed. After this a branch of the militant activist wing of the party (naming itself Shahid al-Sadr) went on a bender--humanbombs were employed against Saddam's allies in the region and his big boss, with the Iraqi, and French/American embassys in Lebanon in '81 & '83 respectively mysteriously transforming themselves into piles of rubble (the latter 2 mistakenly attributed to Hizbullah, which did not exist at the time), attacked the Kuwaiti Emir, the French & American military barracks in Lebanon, and various buildings in Iraq, with various other forms of violence employed in various other directions. I point out the Lebanon activity, it is a fact that very early on Hizbullah owed a great deal to the Iraqi al-Daawa party, the latter which operated as an international movement.

The 80s saw change in the party. Attacks on the Baathist government continued in the course of the war with Iran, some openly siding with Khomeini (this permanently fucked their relations with the Iraqi nationalist tendencies and some sections of society) along with Hakim's SCIRI umbrella (the latter was formed by Tehran originally for use as a "5th column", and as a provisional government if the Islamic Republic was ever able to capture al-Basrah--which it never did). Some of the more activist cadres deserted the Sadr-less movement for Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim's SCIRI umbrella movement in Tehran, others split for an al-Daawa faction based in Tehran but remaining outside Hakim's umbrella organization, others went to Europe (London, officially), a third branch maintained itself underground in Iraq. The three tendencies still exist. The London branch is the collaborator wing, led not by a religious scholar but a technocrat who threw his lot in with the invaders. The Tehran branch grudgingly accepted it on the Iranian gov'ts advice--for some reason Iran is being very useful to the Americans/British on this. I don't know what happened to the underground branch, maybe it melted in the other Sadr's movement.

Considering their roots, it's really ironic that they're lining up to kiss our flag with the rest of them.

The Muqtada Sadr making the headlines today is not directly descended from the martyred al-Daawa Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, but they are related. The tendencies are somewhat different, Muqtada's father having a particularly newer and younger drive to him. I think Muqtada's father is a cousin of Mohammed Baqir. Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr is distinct in his own way, rivalling Sistani for Iraqi Shia leadership in the 90s. After the '91 intifada, Sistani took the "let's keep quiet and try to stay alive" approach he seems to be shedding, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr a more confrontational.

What's important about his movement, among other things I won't go into, is both the ties he established in what is now "Sadr City", the source of his son's strength now, and also among the Turkoman in the north--he was able to get them to adapt their eccentric ways for a more orthodox Shiism, and they're now supporters of Muqtada in the north. That'll make Kirkuk a more messy matter.

Sadr's people support Kazim al-Haeri as the marjaiyya (essentially, "Dean" of the Najafi seminaries and most respected leader of Shias all over the world) and inheritor of his father's work, he having been the top student of his martyred father. Parties like SCIRI/al-Daawa/etc give that nod to Sistani--though they disobey his unwavering disapproval of the puppet Iraqi Governing Council--, along with most Iraqi Shias according to the common information (I don't know for sure based on any personal knowledge, I can only go by what I can filter out from what I read). While being the only Arab Iraqi-born Grand Ayatallah and one of the only 5 Grand Ayatallahs based in Najaf (well, Haeri lives in Qom for the moment--at any rate he's Iraqi Arab by birth, 2 including Sistani are Persian, the other two are from Afghanistan and Pakistan), Haeri is not as accomplished or respected as Sistani. Even so, that among other things is the source of the Sadr/Sistani rivalry that commonly goes without explanation.

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